12/17/2016 The year of the demagogue: how 2016 changed democracy

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Political Populism
The year of the demagogue: how 2016 changed democracy
From Brexit to Donald Trump, this year has seen a thundering repudiation
of the status quo
Lionel Barber

DECEMBER 15, 2016 by: Lionel Barber

On the morning of June 21, two days before the Brexit referendum, I met David
Cameron (http://next.ft.com/content/7e503fd6-37c4-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7)
in Downing Street. During a 25-minute conversation, the prime minister assured
me that everything would be all right on the night. I wasnt entirely convinced.

In hindsight, Brexit (https://www.ft.com/topics/themes/Brexit) defined 2016. This

was the year when the unthinkable became possible, the marginal invaded the
mainstream, and Donald Trump (http://next.ft.com/content/b7bb61ec-c054-11e6-
81c2-f57d90f6741a), a property tycoon and television host, was elevated to US
commander-in-chief.

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12/17/2016 The year of the demagogue: how 2016 changed democracy

In his memoir Present at the Creation (1969), Dean Acheson, a former US secretary
of state, describes how he and fellow Wise Men helped President Harry Truman
to build a new liberal, rule-based order after the second world war. It was founded
on institutions: the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the Nato alliance.

In 2016, as Trump dismissed Nato as obsolete and his consigliere Newt Gingrich
described Estonia as a suburb (http://next.ft.com/content/9bef31a4-aa57-11e6-a0
bb-97f42551dbf4) of St Petersburg, it felt at times as if we were present at the
destruction.

Acheson epitomised the East Coast establishment. He was a diplomat, lawyer and
scholar an expert, if you like. This year, the establishment was hammered, the
experts humbled. Most missed Brexit. Many declared a Trump victory impossible.
Michael Gove, a leading Brexiter, caught the public mood: People in this country
have had enough of experts.

'Trump won by attacking the Republican party as much as his Democratic opponent' Getty Images

Brexit and the Trump triumph mark a revolutionary moment. Not quite 1789 or
1989, but certainly a thundering repudiation of the status quo. Some detect echoes
of the 1930s, with Trump cast as an incipient fascist.

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It was a good year for strongmen: Vladimir Putin in Russia; Recep Tayyip Erdogan
in Turkey; Xi Jinping, now promoted to core leader in China. It was an even
better year for demagogues, the crowd-pleasers and rabble-rousers who feed on
emotions and prejudice. In the year of the demagogue, several vied for the lead
role: Nigel Farage, then Ukip leader, godfather of Brexit and Trump acolyte;
Rodrigo Duterte, a brutal newcomer to power, who pledged to slaughter millions of
drug addicts to clean up the Philippines; and Trump himself, who constantly
marvelled at the size of his crowds.

Yet the 1930s analogy is in many ways misplaced. We are nowhere near a Great
Depression. The US economy is approaching full employment. The pre-Brexit UK
economy has seen employment rise by just over two million since 2010. Credit is
flowing. Corporate profits are up. The trouble is that swaths of the population,
often those living outside the great cities, have little sense of the economic
recovery.

Real incomes in the UK have not grown for the past decade. In the US, 95 per cent
of households still had incomes last year that were below those in 2007, according
to the Economic Policy Institute think-tank. In Europe, unemployment in the
eurozone, especially in countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy, remains high. Yet
the wealth of the top one per cent (the privileged few, to borrow Theresa Mays
mantra) has continued to rise.

Something more profound is happening in advanced democracies. The forces at

work are cultural, economic, social and political, driven in part by rapid
technological change. Artificial intelligence, gene editing, self-driving cars
progress on all these groundbreaking technologies accelerated in 2016. Each is
massively empowering (the smartphone has given everyone a voice) but also
massively disruptive (the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs has barely begun to
be felt).

In political terms, Brexit and the Trump triumph highlight the decline of the party
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system and the end of the old left/right divide. The centre-left appears in terminal
decline. This month, Franois Hollande, whose approval rating hit a low of 4 per
cent, ruled out a second run for the Elyse. Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of
the opposition Labour party, had more to say about the death of Fidel Castro than
Britain departing the EU. Matteo Renzi (http://next.ft.com/content/8dd7a2c0-ba9
9-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080), the centre-left reformer in Italy, lost heavily in his
own referendum on constitutional reform and promptly resigned.

The Conservative or Christian Democrat

centre-right fared better but remains
In 2016, we saw, nally, that this
period call it Globalisation 2.0 under pressure from an anti-immigrant,
is over nationalist fringe, from Austria to
England, France, Germany, Hungary, the
Netherlands and, increasingly, Poland. In
2016, we witnessed the birth of the Fourth Way a new brand of politics that is
nativist, protectionist and bathed in a cultural nostalgia captured by Trumps pledge
to Make America Great Again.

The second development is a widespread disillusion among western democracies

with globalisation, the postwar phenomenon marked by three trends: the Roaring
Eighties deregulation of the Reagan-Thatcher era; the 1994 Uruguay Round
agreement on global trade liberalisation; and the opening of a market economy in
China. The progressive abandonment of controls on capital, goods, services and
labour, epitomised by the launch of the single European market and the single
currency, reached its apogee in the summer of 2007. In 2016, we saw, finally, that
this period call it Globalisation 2.0 is over.

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'In the year of the demagogue, several vied for the lead role, including the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte'
AFP/Getty Images

Free trade has become ever harder to sell to a public worried about job security and
the competitive threat from developing countries. Trump denounced the Trans-
Pacific Partnership pact between the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the
North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Hillary Clinton,
once a free trader, caved. No one countered that the US consumer, including many
Trump voters, bought cheap goods at Target and Walmart thanks to efficient global
supply chains and cheap labour in the developing world. Hostility to free trade was
a vote winner. Only last-minute arm-twisting of the Walloon regional government
in Belgium salvaged a Canada-EU trade pact seven years in the making.

Free movement is also in question. Europe has experienced mass migration on a

scale not seen since the late 1940s. In 2016, the refugee flow from the Middle East
and north Africa was stemmed at one end thanks to a German-brokered deal with
Turkey but record numbers travelled (and drowned) on the treacherous route from
the central Mediterranean to Italy. Terror attacks, notably in France, heightened
public insecurity about immigrants. There was a sense governments had somehow
lost control, of national borders and national identity.

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This explains the power of Trumps pledge to build a beautiful wall on the
Mexican border, and Theresa Mays conference jibe about politically correct
multiculturalism: If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of
nowhere. The party faithful in Birmingham cheered but cosmopolitan London,
home to hundreds of thousands of foreigners, including Mark Carney, the
Canadian governor of the Bank of England, was not amused.

The Brexit referendum exposed an economic gap between winners and losers of
globalisation; but also a cultural divide between those comfortable with the pace of
change, from technology to same-sex marriage, and those wanting to slow down
the clock and rediscover their roots in ethnicity, religion or nationality.

'Brexit and the Trump triumph highlight the decline of the party system' Getty Images

Leaves slogan in the Brexit campaign, Take Back Control, was simple and
brilliantly effective across classes and generations. Constitutionalists liked the idea
of regaining sovereignty from EU institutions. Everyone liked the idea of reclaiming
money from Brussels and diverting the savings to the NHS. Clamping down on
immigration was a vote-winner. No matter that these claims were deeply
misleading (as were Remains claims of imminent economic disaster in the event of

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a Brexit vote). Throughout the year, facts were elastic concepts.

In 2016, the world woke up to fake news (http://next.ft.com/content/2910a7a0-af

d7-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0fa1), sponsored by political activists but also increasingly
by state actors and their surrogates. The CIA accused Russia of being behind the
leaking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, a shocking, brazen
attempt to interfere in a US presidential election. Trump dismissed the claims (htt
p://next.ft.com/content/220451e2-c020-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a) as ridiculous,
as did his supporters. Throughout this political cycle, many appeared to live in a
parallel universe where facts were entirely subjugated to opinion.

Scottie Nell Hughes, a Trump supporter and CNN commentator, explained: So

one thing thats been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that
people that say facts are facts theyre not really facts. Everybody has a way its
kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has
a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not truth. Theres no such thing,
unfortunately, anymore as facts.

Welcome to the world of post-truth

politics (http://next.ft.com/content/85cb
Trumps victory gives succour to the
demagogues-in-waiting in 2017 b2f8-abdd-11e6-9cb3-bb8207902122),
turbocharged by technology such as the
smartphone. A single device allows
individuals to project in real time an unfiltered version of the news and (often
highly partisan) views across Facebook, Google and Twitter. In the US election,
journalists, once enjoying a degree of trust as the filter of last resort, were howled
down or singled out on Twitter as disgusting or lame.

In the UK, both Leave and Remain regularly lambasted the BBC, which tried to
remain neutral. Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford historian, warned presciently
about the risks of fairness bias. The danger was that the BBC, in seeking to
remain impartial, would fail to be informative, especially on complex economic
issues. You give equal airtime to unequal arguments, without daring to say that,
on this or that point, one side has more evidence, or a significantly larger body of

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expert opinion, than the other, he wrote.

'Trump's victory was the triumph of the brand' Reuters

The Trump campaign presented mainstream media with a challenge on a

different scale. His demagoguery broke every taboo in the book, casting Mexicans
as rapists, eliding the difference between traditional Muslims and radical Islamic
terrorists, and threatening to jail his Democratic opponent.

The TV networks, especially Rupert Murdochs Fox News, gave Trump far more
airtime than other candidates. It may not be good for America, but its damn good
for CBS, quipped Les Moonves, head of the media group.

Trump won by attacking the Republican party as much as his Democratic

opponent. He spent hardly any of his own money, less than a fraction of the
Clinton campaigns war chest. His was the triumph of the brand.

Yet Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate at a moment when Americans wanted
change not a continuation of the Obama presidency by other means or a return
to the Bush or Clinton dynasties. She had sky-high negative ratings, just like
Trump. She was not liked, she was not trusted, and she was evasive. Crooked

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Hillary, Trumps signature tweet, stuck for a good reason.

In this respect, it is misleading to suggest that the typical Trump supporter was an
angry white man on opioids from West Virginia. Educated people voted for Trump.
Women voted for Trump. As Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic, Trumps supporters
took him seriously but not literally. By contrast, liberals, including the media, took
Trump literally but not seriously. What this ignores is the damage the tycoon may
have inflicted on public trust in American democracy. He coarsened civic discourse.
He declared the political system corrupt. He even cast doubt on the legitimacy of
the election not once but twice, declining to confirm he would accept the result if he
lost.

In the late spring of 2016, I travelled to Houston, Texas, to have lunch with James
Baker (http://next.ft.com/content/59b6631c-27de-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89), a
former Treasury secretary, US secretary of state and White House chief of staff
under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. I asked him whether America could
survive a Trump presidency. We are a country of laws, limited by bureaucracy.
Presidents are not unilateral rulers, Baker replied.

This confidence in the power of democratic institutions will be tested in the coming
months. Trump wants to undo Obamas legacy and unleash the animal spirits of
American capitalism. The initial reaction in the stock market bordered on euphoric.
Foreign policy is the bigger risk. Trump wants to pursue an America First foreign
policy, renegotiating trade pacts and obliging allies to pay more for their collective
defence. His world is about money not values: America the selfish superpower (htt
p://next.ft.com/content/782381b6-ad91-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24), as Robert
Kagan has described it.

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The centre-left appears in terminal decline. Marine Le Pen hopes to triumph in next year's French
elections AFP/Getty Images

Trumps victory gives succour to the demagogues-in-waiting in 2017, notably

Marine Le Pen, who will almost certainly make it through to the run-off for the
French presidency. A win for Le Pen on top of Brexit would surely spell the end of
the European Union. Elections in the Netherlands may also signal a shift to the
right. Even in Germany, Angela Merkel, running for a fourth term, faces a
challenge from the populist right in the form of Alternative fr Deutschland, which
will make the task of forming a ruling coalition much harder.

Trumps foreign policy, assuming action follows words, also leaves the door wide
open for the rising power of China. His abandonment of the TPP a geopolitical
building block as well as a trade pact has unsettled Japan and Pacific neighbours.
His anti-Mexican rhetoric has undermined the peso and left Latin Americans
wondering whether Beijing is a safer bet. Among the Baltic states and Scandinavia,
many are fretting about Natos defence guarantee in the face of Russian
aggrandisement under Putin.

For more than two centuries, the US has served as a beacon for democratic values
such as pluralism, tolerance and the rule of law. For the most part, it has been on

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the right side of history. In 2016, Americans for the first time voted into the White
House a man with no previous government or military experience. Like Brexit, it
was a high-risk gamble with utterly unpredictable consequences.

Trumps winner-takes-all approach and his lack of respect for minority rights
violates a cornerstone of democracy and free society, as set out in the 10th of the
Federalist Papers (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp) written by
James Madison, one of the founding fathers. His position mirrors the more
extreme Brexiter demands that the will of the people be respected at all costs.
Anyone who raises objections the media, the opposition or, indeed, the judiciary
risks being branded enemies of the people.

This is not merely populism run rampant. It is a denial of politics itself, which, as
the late scholar Bernard Crick reminds us, is the only alternative to government by
coercion and the tyranny of the majority.

We have been warned.

Lionel Barber is the FTs editor

Photographs: Getty; Eyevine

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